For my Tuesday(January 12th) podcast this week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sami Bahri the first dentist known to utilize Lean Management techniques to continuously improve the delivery of quality dental care. This implementation has benefited patients, employees, dental laboratories, suppliers, etc. In 2006, Bahri Dental Group provided the same amount of dental treatments as 2005, but needed 40 percent less resources, thanks to the application of “Lean Dental Management.” 
An excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe: What have you learned from this that you think applies to other professional practices?
Sami: I think Joe, not only Lean, but any management theory. I am going to talk about the same ones that we already mentioned; TQM, Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma; they all apply to anything that you are doing.
Joe: They all apply to a process and if you are doing a process they apply.
Sami: You can use any, right? So it is just which system or which theory gives you the best results. And so far, in our practice, Lean has given the best results. I really think it applies to everything. Now the key is what do we teach people? And my experience is really in that regard. I learned it on my own from books and I have fallen in a few traps. The first one, the first trap that I fell in would be eliminating waste. You teach someone who doesn’t know about Lean and you say, “Lean is about eliminating waste.” And you say anything that you do not need to apply right away is a waste.
So what we did was looking around us and eliminating waste and eliminating waste going nowhere. Why? Because, we were not eliminating waste in our main flow, the patient. I would eliminate waste at the front desk and the way they are handling insurance. Or how they are filing insurance, or verifying insurance.
But, I was still making several appointments for my patient. Until we decided what our main flow is. The principal flow is the patient flow. Anything else: like how to prepare the appointment, how to set up the room, how to prepare the insurance verification and the patient’s file in the computer. All of these are support flows.
As long as you are working on improving your support flows without really paying attention to the main flow, we didn’t see any improvements. My main message would be if you want to learn the Lean tools at least learn them while you are improving your principal flow. Decide what your principal flow is and work on that. That is where Lean is. Anything else like improving operations which is the same as support flows did not give us the results that we were looking for. That is probably one of the main lessons that I learned.
Dr. Sami Bahri Book: Follow the Learner: The Role of a Leader in Creating a Lean Culture